How to Use Twitter as a Marketing Weapon – Guy Kawasaki – DisneySMMoms Liveblog

Eating breakfast, listening to Leanne, Director of Social Media from Walt Disney World. She’s thanking all of the moms who helped organize this event. We’re all getting t-shirts with the conference logo on it. Smallest size is a large. Sigh.

Later on, we’ll have the opportunity to do some volunteer work with some Disney Channel stars. A world-record breaking event coming up… Extreme Makeover Home Edition… Ty Pennington will be here!!

Leanne is introducing Guy Kawasaki. (Does anyone here not know who he is?)

Here’s Guy, who will be giving us a live demo: How to Use Twitter as a Marketing Weapon.

“Everyone here is on Twitter, right? I can assume that?”

“Why do I care that lonelyguy15 says there’s a long line at Starbucks?” But one day the light went on.  We’ll get a link to his presentation Web page later.

All of the  work happens with Twitter search. He searched for his name, showing tweets from all of the lovely ladies here who  are  tweeting about him.

“I feel like Dick Cheney and George Bush, where I can spy on anyone.” Much laughter. Hehe.

Reputation management. Searching  for things.

Using Starbucks Via as an example. We’re all getting samples of the instant coffee. Loving the tweet on the screen asking if anyone snorts Starbucks Via coffee. Guy’s disclosure: Starbucks is a sponsor of Alltop. He says it’s awesome because they get free coffee all the time.

“Imagine you work for Toyota.” Doh.

“How can we use Twitter to really sell?” Uh oh. Guy is talking about Twitter Nazis. He says he encounters them every day.

UFM. People thinks it stands for something other than what it does… “UnFollow Me.” (I did a few months ago. Sorry, Guy. Your presentation is good, but I don’t want to be sold on Twitter that way.)

Using Dell as an example of how  brands sell on Twitter. They have a tweet from January where they were unloading 20″ HD flat panels for $99. “I think that is just a beautiful thing.” Because they don’t have to call up a marketing guy who spends one month coming up with an ad to figure out how to dump all of this product.

@KogiBBQ uses Twitter very successfully to tell people where to find their street food truck, tweeting where they are at any given time and where they’re going next. They have 55k  followers, and they have 50-100 people waiting foor them wherever they go.

And there’s @comcastcares. Can’t have a Twitter presentation without mentioning them. Guy believes that his experience with Comcast is the norm, not just because of who he is, or who Frank thinks that he  is.

Guy has a  Honda Odyssey. (He bought it. Pointing that out for Michael Gray.) First year they offered the run-flat tires. But only a Honda dealer can change them, they only last about 25k miles, and they cost about $400 each. Guy was not happy when he discovered this, and he tweeted about it. Found out it was Michelin’s fault. Tweeted about them. He got a refund.

“It’s probably a dirty little secret, but big brands are really afraid of what people say about them on Twitter.” That can be used to your advantage. (I have learned that to my satisfaction, too.)

This is not like his usual presentations. This is more off the cuff.

“Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.” LOL. We’re getting a story about Virgin America that may or may not be true, but it’s amusing. He’s telling another story of his own, where he wanted to see if it would work for him.

“If you’re so good,” he tweeted, “tell the  flight attendant  to bring me a Coke.”

“Why don’t you just ask the flight attendant?” was his reply.

Guy uses Twitter to prospect. Using Camaro repair shop as an example. Showing us how a repair shop in Palo Alto could use Twitter to  find people tweeting about Camaros within 100 miles of their zip code. [camaro near:94301 within:100mi]

He knows  someone who closes 1 out of 10 people.

Uh oh. He just called SEOs witch doctors who  don’t know any more about what’s going on at Google than anyone else does. I think some SEOs I know would be unhappy to hear that. SEO and Twitter are used to capture two different audiences, in my opinion.

Twitter advanced search is where you take Twitter from being touchy-feely having fun to really getting down to business. I’ve never seen this screen. It looks pretty useful, and I’ll have to check this out.

“I truly do love Twitter. Twitter has really changed my life.”

“Twitter is fast and free and ubiquitous. I don’t know what’s wrong with Twitter.”

Guy is always on the verge of being suspended because the TOS say not to tweet primarily links. Or repeat your tweets. He thinks that Twitter just turns a blind eye to him. He  did get suspended once when using Twitter Hawk to target people searching for Britney Spears, and people might have reported that account for being annoying. Now he uses the manual approval  process so he doesn’t spam users.

He uses Twitter to primarily drive pageviews.

“I would use either TwitterFeed or Objective Marketer to tweet all of your blog posts.” I actually stopped using TwitterFeed, but I do manually tweet links to all of my blog posts. I like to use custom short URLs.

750,000 people use TwitterFeed to post links to Mashable in their Twitter timelines.

(I apologize if there are typos. I’m using TJ’s netbook here, and the keyboard is so much smaller than mine.)

Showing us Alltop. Moms category. (How do we get listed, Guy?) Mousing over a headline lets you read the first paragraph. “If you want to be added, just let me know.” (Thanks!)

Guy uses MyAlltop to tweet links all the time. “These are my favorite things.”

Plug for boston.com Big Picture feed. Stunning pictures!

He also uses StumbleUpon to find links to tweet. Also SmartBrief. Found an article about how “consumers trust their friends less.” May be a redefinition of “friends,” not an indication of how much we trust the people we actually know and love.

Objective Marketer lets you set up tweet campaigns to repeat tweets at specific intervals. He uses 10 hour intervals, uses different links to track who clicks when. If he only tweeted the links once, he’d be missing 1,500 clicks over the course of the a four tweet campaign. “Four times is roughly the limit.” More than that, people get annoyed. Less than that, and you leave clicks on the table. I think I need to check this out, just for getting my blog posts out on Twitter.

Using CNN as an example. The same exact story is repeated every 30 minutes because they assume there will be a different audience watching it every time.

Guy has 213k followers, and “pisses off” about  3 people every day. “It will take a long time before I piss them all off.” (I don’t normally use that phrase, but it loses its punch if I were to paraphrase.)

“My point here is that the key to Twitter is to get more followers. The way to get more followers is to find high content.” And he’s showed us how to find high content.

Posterous. I don’t think any of us knew what he was asking about. It sounded like he was asking who used “posters.” Guy hates losing pageviews. “Why not stick Posterous into Alltop?” At Holy Kaw, Guy and “four ghosts” look for good content to write up. Mashable combined with Huffington Post combined with Fark, in his description. Pointing out the ads on Holy Kaw, which is the point, he happily admits.

Talking about ghosts and how Twitter Nazis hate them. (I’m not a fan of Guy’s ghost tweeters. Did he just call me a Twitter Nazi?) He thinks that 5 smart people looking for good content are better than 1. (I’m cool with that for @alltop, but not @guykawasaki. Personal brand vs company brand.)

Janice (@5minutesformom) wants to know if Guy responds to people. Since she spends so much time interacting with people. Guy doesn’t view his public timeline. He uses TweetDeck favorites as tickers. His ghosts only do outbound links. If you @reply him or DM him, that is always him. He doesn’t add characters before the @ sign so that only the person he’s replying to sees it, because his replies aren’t

(@SelfishMom tweeted how handsome he is so it would show up on the screen behind him. It did. He asked her to stand up. She  did. She asked if he could put her at the top of Alltop for the day. He said to email him later and she’d “like it on top.” Oh my!”)

“Is there a specific group that are the Nazis?” He answers that it’s the neophytes that often have used Twitter for 30 days or less and decide they know how he should use Twitter. The other kind is SEO consultants. “White, male, 45 years old, virgin, living with his mother who still has Buzz Lightyear sheets.” Leanne is plugging her ears. “He knows how Google works because he watches Matt Cutts every day.” Blah blah blah. Yeah, he just totally offended a bunch of people that I know. And me by association, a little!

“You may not agree with what I do, but at least I am transparent.” That’s a very good point, Guy. I give you a lot of credit for that. “You may not like what you see when you go behind the curtain…” but at  least he’s open about it.

Special offer: Check out Objective Marketer, use promo code wiseguy to use it for three months. (Disclosure: he’s an advisor for the company, so that’s why he loves it so much.)

Disclosure: I paid $350 to attend the Disney Social Media Moms Celebration in Walt Disney World. Included in my conference fee: our room at the Polynesian Resort, Park Hopper tickets, the conference sessions, most of our meals, and a few little extra surprises. That being said, my opinions are my own, and my blogs posts about the experience are my honest opinion.

Christina Gleason (976 Posts)

That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.